Thursday, February 4, 2016

Taking a bite of the Apple (again)

This article is
a first. The first written on our new computer. And the first I’ve ever written
on an Apple system.

Our very first
home computer – way back in 1988 – was an Apple II GS, supposedly ideal for our
then-7-year-old. About three months after we bought it, Apple announced it was abandoning
the Apple II and pursuing the Macintosh.

It was a good introduction
to the tech world. As companies go on to pursue new products, they tend to
abandon the products (and the customers) who made them successful in the first
place.

Our next home
computer was not an Apple product. It was Microsoft DOS-based. If I recall
correctly, it was an HP. For more than 20 years after that, we stayed
DOS-based, as did 90 percent of the rest of world. My company used DOS-based
computers as well; every employer I’ve had since the advent of computers has
used DOS-based systems.

Then came the
iPad. I was one of three guinea pigs at work given one to try out. Other
departments started buying them, over the objections of the IT department.
Finally, IT capitulated and accepted the inevitable. People liked iPads. They
were much easier to carry around than laptops. And more visual.

The next hurdle
to fall was the Blackberry mobile phone. For years, we could have any phone we
wanted, as long as it was a Blackberry. The civil disobedience that was the
iPad in the office became the civil disobedience of the iPhone. My last phone
before I retired was an iPhone. The phone I bought for post-retirement was an
iPhone.

Then the time
arrived for a new home computer. Actually, it arrived a couple of years ago,
but we extended the life of our old Dell by getting it fixed and adding some
capacity and speed. But the time had finally arrived, and our 8-year-old Dell needed
to retire.

Based on our
experience with the iPad and the iPhone, we decided to try Apple. Our new iMac
All-in-One came home Monday (that’s a photo of it at the right).

I had talked
with people who had owned both Macs and DOS-based computers, and they said the
biggest difference was the commands. Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V don’t work on the Mac. I
have used those two commands a lot. As in thousands of times. As in they are
imprinted on my brain. It took me a while, by I finally figured out out to do
it on the Mac. As in, I figured it out by accident. As in, I accidentally
pushed the cursor to the top of the screen. I found the big stuff hidden up
there. Like File, Edit, View, Format and Tools. It was a major discovery.

My second major
discovery: how to save documents. The technicians at the store where we bought
the computer saved all of our old Dell computer documents into a folder on the Mac
desktop. And they saved it all – music, photographs, Word documents, Excel documents,
PowerPoint presentations, email. Transferring the documents from that folder to
the Mac applications should be simple. Except it’s slightly more complicated
than a simple drag and drop. You also have to save it within the application (I
used the “save as” process). And it doesn’t save by your old folders. I think
what happens is that you drag the folder, like a group of Word documents, to
Word on the Mac, and the Mac empties the folder so you can save it as a folder
or album again.

Minimizing pages
is also different. It’s fairly straightforward, but I drove myself crazy trying
to do it from an expanded screen (the button to minimize goes away when you
have an expanded page, and I had to jerry-rig the page to find it again). But I’ve
now learned how to keep those pages open.

I did get the new
printer operating almost immediately. Getting the Mac through set-up was also
easy. But operating the Mac is not the same as operating a DOS-based system,
especially when you have 20+ years of experience with DOS-based systems.

There are
tutorials, and I did look at one for Word on the iMac. It looks like one of the
PowerPoint slides that try to cram 50,000 ideas into one slide.

One big
advantage is having the time to learn the iMac. Trial and error is actually a
good way to learn. Trying to figure it out is also a good way. And I have the
old Dell set up in another room as a backup.

Slowly, I’m
getting there. We’ll see if this new bite of the Apple will take.

2 comments:

Man, I switched to Mac two years ago. It was a rough switch for me, but the whole ecosystem is definitely worth it. I'm not more comfortable on a mac than a PC. The best part of all is the way things move between my computer, my phone, my apple tv, and the family sharing account.

I still marvel when I get an app store purchase request from my kids while I'm at work.

Interestingly, my son is full on Windows fanboy for desktop. He is loyal to his ipod, but he hates the Mac. I think it is more Freudian than technical preference.

I made the switch earlier this year. One thing that really helped was keeping my old Dell keyboard. The Apple keyboard and mouse were not suited for my style of hammering out text. I was ecstatic when I simply plugged in the USB and everything worked well.And some fool took out the mail merge function out of Pages, so there's a workaround for the printed page and nothing for sending email with a mail merge.A friend said the iMac will outlive about three PCs, so we'll see if the investment brings a return.

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Professional writer exploring faith and culture, life and work; happily married to Janet, the love of my life; father of two grown sons. Award-winning speechwriter and communication consultant. I am also a contributing editor for The High Calling and for TweetSpeak Poetry. I am also the author of the novels "Dancing Priest" and "A Light Shining," and the non-fiction book "Poetry at Work."